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I've recently made it to level 31 and picked up the WAR soul. Figured I would start a thread here and look for tips and tricks of things to make a WAR a successful tank so that I could start developing my techniques early and get a good grasp on how to use the abilities in our tool kit to their best.
PS:inb4RollPaladin :p
Stuff that I have learned doing copious amounts of dungeons on my WAR:
On any kind of trash pack, open with a single use of Overpower if you can and then move into a Butcher's Block combo rather than a Maim/XXX combo. When doing this combo, use Heavy Swing on the marked kill target, Skull Sunder on a secondary, and move back to the kill target for Butcher's Block. Start a new BB combo, but this time drop Skull Sunder on the kill target and Butcher's Block on a secondary target. *Then* move into the Maim combos and Fracturing. Doing this will generate a massive cushion of enmity on everything without wasting a lot of time or TP. A single use of BB will pretty much guarantee you threat on a target, even the focus target, for a good long while not completely demolishing your TP thanks to the massive threat generation it provides at a discount price.
Use Bloodbath often and with Berserk and Vengeance. If you can, don't use Berserk until you've had Bloodbath up for 10 seconds or so, such that the Pacification doesn't eat into its contributions. Vengeance benefits from both Berserk and Bloodbath, which will give you a veritable *rain* of healing number flying across your screen when you fight packs.
Inner Beast should not be used except as an emergency heal or when you don't have a healer around (so that the +healing doesn't matter since you're not getting healed anyways). Here's some math: Wrath provides 15% +healing and the fastest that you can generate Wrath stacks is 5 every 20 seconds (7.5 seconds for a 3 part combo and 5 seconds for a 2 part combo to get the last stack; you can reduce this by 2.5 seconds by "front loading" with a Heavy Swing, but you're restricting when you can use it). Inner Beast takes up an additional GCD so the use rate on it is 22.5 seconds. If you go through the stack generation, you'll see that, during that 22.5 seconds when you're not at a full 5 stacks, you're managing only 7% +healing, which means that you need to be getting at least 8% of a healer's output over 22.5 seconds from Inner Beast. On my WAR, I'll get roughly 800 hp from Inner Beast. This means that, in order for it to be better than the healing from the group's healer(s), I need healers to provide less than 444 healing per GCD ((800 / 22.5) / .08), which is well below the maintenance healing capability of every healer I've ever run with.
The same holds true for Unchained and Steel Cyclone: do not use them if you're actually taking damage. The loss of your Wrath stacks *vastly* overweighs the gains provided from other mechanisms. At best, you could use it once every 3 minutes when you have Infuriate available to get those Wrath stacks immediately.
Good info. Any kind of macro or keybindings I should try to set up?
What about cross class abilities form the GLD and PUG? I believe I have 3 ability slots open atm and trying to prioritize and figure out which abilities to take. Is convalesence worth a slot? Right now I am using Featherfoot, Flash, and Second Wind for the slots.
The best info you can get is probably: Don't waste wrath stacks.
It's tempting to use Inner Beast, because it's a 300 potency attack that ignores defiance damage penalty, but the healing you get from 5 stacks of wrath is not something to scoff at. Once you hit level 50, you can (almost) keep 5 stacks of wrath up at all times, if you're conservative with your IB usage, and use Infuriate directly after IB.
Learning to manage wrath stacks has made me go from unable to tank Ifrit HM by a long shot, to being able to tank it without much of a problem.
When Infuriate is on cooldown, use Second Wind, or Thrill of Battle to get your hp up - if your hp is already up, but Infuriate is on cooldown, it's a good idea to pop either Foresight or Featherfoot, to minimize the chance of having to pop IB before Infuriate is up again. It's important that you learn what abilities mobs make, that you take most burst damage from, so you're ready to pop IB right after you take the burst.
If you are forced to use IB when Infuriate is down, remember that Berserk and Vengeance gives a stack of wrath each, when they're used.
Other than that, you need to make sure to keep Storm's Eye up on bosses at least. It's on a short duration, so every other combo you do, has to be storm's eye, if you want 100% uptime. Pay attention to aggro meters, if you're over 50% above your nearest party member in threat, you may consider using Storm's Path combo, instead of Butcher's Block combo.
And a final piece of advice: If you ever need burst aggro in the beginning of a fight, initiate by doing something like this:
Assuming there are no adds:
Infuriate before pull, wait a few sec (just so Infuriate gets to tick a bit on the cd)
Pull with Tomahawk > Use Unchained > Use Foresight (no wrath stacks, it's good to get some mitigation while you build them)
Hit with Heavy Swing > Berserk > Skull Sunder > Butcher's Block
Heavy Swing > Maim > Storm's Eye
That should give you quite a bit of a head start over the rest of your group.
If Infuriate isn't on CD, think of a way you can get to use it again, efficiently (by thinking ahead - using Unchained before you take a big hit, only to be forced to use IB right after Infuriate can put you in a bad spot).
Great stuff, thanks. Good to have this kind of info and discussion and not how WARs can't tank. :D
Teroril hit the nail on the head. Don't waste Wrath.
Use Inner Beast after spike damage to help out healers but try to make sure you've got Infuriate (level 50 skill) to get your wrath back.
Don't Overpower Sleeping mobs. Just annoys the mages. When a few are sleeping drag the rest away and turn your back on the sleeping mobs which means overpower is all good. But you really don't need to use it that much.
Cross class abilities I use -
Featherfoot - PUG
Flash - GLA (Awesome for sleeping mobs)
Second Wind - PUG (Works off attack power so use Berserk and it'll really help)
Convalescence - GLA
Inner Release - PUG (Added Crit % Always help with enmity, Bloodbath and Inner Beast)
Man I play Warrior so differently than most people. But then I play in a semi-static group also so I can get away with more things that I can't in random pick up groups. The above I won't say is wrong. The worse thing that can happen while a WAR is tanking is both the WAR and the heal stepping on each other's toes. Sitting on wrath stacks is the safest bet to keep this from happening but I said this in another thread.
If the healer does nothing... and I mean absolutely nothing but heal you... every 3 seconds. And lets say they average about 1k a heal. Over the course of a minute they'll have healed you for 20,000 HP. And from that 20,000 HP keeping up 5 stacks of wrath will have given you an extra 3000 HP a minute. Now in my example I forgot to factor in the fact Inner Beast sits on the Global Cool Down but for the sake of simplicity lets just say a WAR can 'roughly' get off three Inner Beasts a minute. Now in my example I used the low ball figure 600 HP return from Inner Beast. And that is LOW, I you can look at a PLD on any video and see what that most land Rage of Halone for 190-230 damage. And a WAR using an attack that has 40 more potency and ignores the damage penalty should be able to clear that EASY.
But lets say you are hitting for 200 damage on your naked unbuffed Inner Beasts. 3 of those = 1800 heal return. That is a loss of 1200 potential HP. But you'll never, or should I say very RARELY have to use Inner Beast completely naked.
You factor in the 30% buff from Maim and Storm's Eye. Well that 600 becomes 780 and 3 of those 2340. A loss of 660 potential HP.
But like I said that is with the low figure of 200 damage. Bump that up to 250. Your return becomes 750 as a base. Which becomes 2250. With Maim and Storm's Eye that 750 becomes 975. With comes to 2975 heal return from using Inner Beast vs the passive 3000 from holding on to wrath. So not even taking into account Internal Release, Berserk, Blood Bath, or Infuriate, the health returned from Inner Beast is close to the bonus healing from holding on to our Wrath. So what is gained by using your stacks and what is gained by keeping them.....
For one you gain added hate. Not only from the spike damage of Inner Beast but holding on to your stacks means your healer's heals are bigger. Their bigger heals means they are generating more hate for their heals. Now is this something that you should worry about? No. Hate is poop easy to keep and there should be no fear of loosing hate. But this does mean one thing. The more hate you can claim for yourself the less you have to rely on Butcher's Block, let you have to rely on Butcher's Block the more you can fit in Storm's Path. The more you can fit in Storm's Path the more those little heals are going to add up.
But you do gain something for holding on to your stacks and that is insurance. If you don't know the rhythm of the fight and you use Inner Beast and the boss comes out with a heavy move or all of a sudden five adds come in out of no where you're going to look kinda silly getting caught with out and wrath stacks to help mitigate some of that heavy damage. Also like with the above if your have a new healer or one that just doesn't know your rotations and habits yet, saving your Inner Beasts emergencies will prevent your heal from overwriting theirs and vice versa.
Ultimately its not about always holding on to your stacks of wrath or always spending them as soon as they are up. What I like about WAR is that it is a VERY fluid job. You pretty much have to play it by feel and develop a flow for each situation. First thing I say, and this goes for any take. Learn your comfort zones... zone off your HP. Like for me, I tell me healers, heal me like normal keep me above x HP. If you see I have five stacks of wrath let me fall down to x HP and if you feel the need to cast hit me with Stoneskin instead of a cure. And if I hit x HP no matter if I have five stacks or not heal my butt! Know your HP zones, make sure your healers know them. (Even if you like sitting on your stacks having your healer throw out a stoneskin instead of a heal when you get to low or close to low HP is a GREAT insurance policy. Sometimes I get low and use Inner Beast and get a lucky/unexpected crit which would have made their heal go completely to waste but since Stoneskin absorbed the damage while I healed myself no potential HP gets wasted.^^) Also keep in mind while Kitru is correct in how long it takes to build 5 wrath stacks you can eliminate 5 seconds of that every 90 seconds with Berserk and every 150s with Vengeance.
EDIT: Had a bit section on macros here that I needed to pull out. Half of it was either slightly are greatly incorrect and the other half was not detailed enough. I'm still in the process of figuring out my preferred macro set up. So I'm taking this part out and might make another post on macros at a later time.
And that should be enough to get started. Don't have to use all or any of it, that is what I love about WAR. Its just so flexible in how you play it. You can play it their way, you can play it my way, or you can find you own way that works for you. ^^ Beats spamming the same rotation over and over again and waiting on cooldowns I'll tell you that. (Just kidding I know good PLD's do more than just Rage of Halone and hit cool downs all day, I jest, I jest. ^^)
Great advice gentlemen. It's good to get a few different perspectives on a topic like this. For people like me who have a lot to learn, I don't care who's advice is "better" than who's. I care about anyone who knows a better way of doing things than how I'm doing them right now;):eek: